The following are excerpts from “Republic, Lost, How Money Corrupts Congress – and a Plan to Stop It?” by Lawrence Lessig, a professor of law at Harvard Law School:
“As [Ronald] Reagan described, quoting (who he said was) Alexander Fraser Tytle): ‘A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover they can vote themselves largesse out of the public treasury. From that moment on the majority always votes for the candidate promising the most benefits from the treasury – with the result that democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy.’” …
“When you look at the causes of the massive explosion in government debt, however, it’s hard to see ‘the masses’ as responsible for much of anything. Instead, the overwhelming dynamic in income in America over the past two decades has been rising inequality, which ‘government taxes and benefits have exacerbated …an outcome witnessed in virtually no other nation.’ [Barack Obama]. Sure, the Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, and Modernization Act was designed to help the middle class. But Part D was a $49.3 billion gift to big PhRMA. Sure, health care reform will help millions of uninsured, but it was also a $250 billion gift to PhRMA and the insurance industry. Sure, Obama pledged $700 billin to save Wall Street and another $800 billion to stimulate the economy. But it was the banks that received the vast majority of that bailout (and more important, the $9 trillion of effectively zero-interest loans from the Fed). Few than $75 billion was ever intended to go the homeowners, and in the end, less than $4 billion actually did.
“The engine behind this spending, or at least the most horsepower, came not from the masses, but from the special interests. And these interests could leverage their power to achieve this rapaciousness because – in part at least – of the ‘self-reinforcing cycle of mutual financial dependency’ between members of Congress and the lobbyists, as the American Bar Association’s Lobbying Tax Force put it.”
